hiefs, stroked his beard and groaned.

"Hai! hai!" he muttered. "It has come at last. But I am too old, too
old, to serve a new master. Shagpur will have another gate-keeper now,
Ahmed-ji."

"What meanest thou, old man?" asked Ahmed, wondering.

"Minghal has come not for plunder, but for mastery," was the reply.
"'Tis what he has meditated for a dozen years; and who can strive
against Fate? When the master comes back he will find that Shagpur is no
longer his. If he resists he will be slain; if he accepts his lot, he
will be loaded with chains or cast out of the village, a beggar to the
end of his days."

"And what of us, then?" asked Ahmed.

"Hai!" said the old man. "As for you, I speak not, Ahmed-ji; but for me,
I am too old, as I said. I have my knife."

Ahmed looked into the gate-keeper's face. He read there neither fear nor
despair, nothing but a calm resolution. Then he uttered a scornful
laugh.

"No one can strive against Fate, truly," he said; "but who knows that
Fate has given us into Minghal's hand? By the beard of the Prophet,
Ahsan----"

But the old man put his hand on the boy's mouth.

"Hush, Ahmed-ji," he said, with a sort of stern tenderness; "'tis not
meet, little one, that oath in your mouth. You have well-nigh forgotten,
but I do not forget. We are as we were born, and you were born a
Feringhi."

CHAPTER THE SECOND

The Making of a Pathan

Eight years before this raid of Minghal's on Shagpur, a small boy, dark,
bright-eyed, happy-looking, was sitting on the grass at some little
distance from an open tent, nursing a wooden sword, and trying to make
conversation in babbling Urdu with a big, swarthy, bearded Pathan who
squatted opposite him, and smiled as he tried to understand and answer
the little fellow's questions. From the tent came the sound of voices,
and the Pathan would now and then lift his eyes from the child and dart
a keen glance towards the spot where Mr. George Barclay,
deputy-commissioner of the district, was engaged in dealing with one of
the troublesome cases that came before him for settlement.

For many years the dwellers in the plains of the Panjab had suffered
from the encroachments of their neighbours in the hills. At first these
hill-men only came to the plains in the winter-time, when their own bare
lands became uninhabitable from frost and snow, and returned in the
summer, when they might find sustenance for their flocks, and good
hunting. But seeing the